KIRKUS REVIEW

A focused study of how the “biggest,
wealthiest metropolis in the North” proved as much of a hindrance to the Union
war effort as a help.

Strausbaugh (The Village: 400 Years of Beats
and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village,
2013, etc.), who has been writing about New York City for 25 years, tells a
gritty tale of opportunism and chutzpah involving the financial capital of the
riven United States when faced with the shutting down of its two golden
commodities: cotton and slaves. Around the time of the secession of the
Southern states from the Union, cotton represented “a whopping 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the port of New York.” Not only did the South rely
on the New York bankers to finance the expansion of King Cotton—in 1860, the
U.S. exported two-thirds of the world’s cotton—but the South, which deigned to
develop the necessary mills, had to ship the cotton up the coast or across the
Atlantic for manufacture. This allowed New Yorkers to take their cut. Moreover,
despite the ban on slave-running since 1820, the practice continued illegally,
to enormous profit; the author notes that by the 1850s “it was an open secret
that New York was the North’s major slaving port.” At the outbreak of war with
the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, patriotic
fervor gripped the numerous penny tabloids, and the immigrant communities
mobilized target companies. Yet Strausbaugh emphasizes how the struggle by poor
immigrants to wrestle employment from the freed blacks led to animosity and
even rioting. While this contingent would have never fought over the cause of
slavery, the abolitionists and progressives were vociferous, as represented by
Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. New York rebounded nicely with
war profiteering, creating a whole new class of “shabby aristocracy.”

A narrative that smoothly and
engagingly incorporates many stories of the war that have been told separately
elsewhere.

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